Tag: Covid-19

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Using Tech to Build Supply Chain Resilience in a Changing World

Source: Using Tech to Build Supply Chain Resilience in a Changing World (entrepreneur.com)

Proper supply chain management is critical to smooth business operation, agility and profitability. Beyond coordination, resilience is a key quality required for supply chain management.

Covid-19 related supply chain disruptions have affected most industries. Vast numbers of companies across the globe experienced troubles during Covid-19, impacting shipment timing, costs, efficiency and revenues. These impacts highlight the importance of building a supply chain that can weather a storm and be capable of quick recovery.

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China Locks Down City Containing One of World’s Busiest Ports, Could Impact Supply Chain

China Locks Down City Containing One of World’s Busiest Ports, Could Impact Supply Chain
Source: Newsweek
Published: January 7, 2022

The Chinese industrial city of Ningbo has been shut down due to COVID-19 and the lockdown has its port continuing to be backed up. Located in the Zhejiang province of China, Ningbo is home to the third-largest port in the world. However, lockdown measures could worsen the already-disrupted port as worldwide supply chain woes persist.

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Preparing Supply Chain for the Next Disruption Beyond COVID-19: Managerial Antecedents of Supply Chain Resilience

Ethan Nikookar, Yoshio Yanadori

International Journal of Operations & Production Management

Preparing supply chain for the next disruption beyond COVID-19: managerial antecedents of supply chain resilience | Emerald Insight

Article publication date: 10 December 2021

Purpose

COVID-19 once again showed the importance of building resilience in supply chains. Extant research on supply chain resilience management has successfully identified a set of organizational antecedents that contribute to supply chain resilience. However, little is known about the mechanisms by which these antecedents are developed within a firm. Drawing on the dynamic managerial capabilities theory, the current study aims to investigate the critical role that supply chain managers play in developing the organizational antecedents. Specifically, this study shows that supply chain managers’ social capital, human capital and cognition are instrumental to the development of three organizational supply chain resilience antecedents: visibility, responsiveness and flexibility, which subsequently enhance the firm’s supply chain resilience.

The authors employ survey data collected from 598 manufacturing firms in Australia, and Hayes and Preacher’s (2014) parallel multiple mediator model to empirically test the hypotheses.

Findings

The findings of the study establish that supply chain managers’ social capital, human capital and cognition indeed have implications for developing supply chain resilience. Furthermore, the mediators through which managers’ social capital, human capital and cognition improve supply chain resilience are identified in the current study.

Originality/value

The study contributes to the extant literature on supply chain resilience, investigating the role that supply chain managers play in developing the resilience of their firm.

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Learning from Supply Disruptions Caused by SARS-CoV-2: Use of Additive Manufacturing as a Resilient Response for Public Procurement

Learning from supply disruptions caused by SARS-CoV-2: use of additive manufacturing as a resilient response for public procurement

Purpose

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has had severe effects on economies worldwide and, in particular, on public institutions that must keep their operations running while supply chains are interrupted. The purpose of this study is to examine how public institutions act during a pandemic to ensure the security of supply.

Design/methodology/approach

The distinct focus is if, why and how public institutions have adopted additive manufacturing (AM) – a production technology colloquially known as three-dimensional printing in which a product is created by joining raw material layer by layer based on a digital model (computer-aided design [CAD] file) of the product – in reaction to supply disruptions caused by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. For this purpose, four cases within the context of the pandemic supply disruption are used as the units of analysis.

Findings

The findings are twofold: public institutions reacted, on the one hand, with a behavioral solution approach, trying to solve the supply disruption with new or changed forms of cooperation and collaboration. On the other hand, public institutions used a technical solution approach (TSA) as a supply disruption response and intensified their use of AM.